Help form correlations/connections between ideas

Normal Cardiac Cycle

Understanding the normal cardiac cycle provides a basis for understanding heart murmurs, arrhythmias, and other disorders. The various aspects of the cycle are often presented in a static fashion and on wide-ranging pages of a textbook (see 'Traditional' figure), requiring extra work to draw connections between valvular events, pressure and volume changes, and heart sounds.

An animation of the cardiac cycle (see 'New' figure) shows the process in a dynamic fashion with sound. One purpose of the diagram is to illustrate how normal closure of the mitral and aortic valves is correlated with the heart sounds, since recognizing abnormal function of these valves is the key to diagnosing relatively common disorders such as aortic stenosis. Use the buttons in the 'New' diagram to play or step through the cycle and observe how valve closure corresponds with the heart sounds.